Guild Wars 2

First off, these weapons are permanent so there is no reason to be worried about that. The pricing, however, depends on a number of factors:

- These skins are unique, but not everyone likes them and is willing to pay a large premium for them. The bow is most popular, followed by the staff and finally the shield. This is also reflected in the price (although the shield is also more common).

- The supply of these weapons is limited. They dropped only during Halloween and you can craft them. Crafting requires insane materials, however, some of which dropped only during Halloween. Crafting is therefore not very feasible (actually I think ANet hugely overestimated the popularity of these skins when they decided on their materials)

- Due to their limited supply, people tried to speculate with them. Right after Halloween, one or more parties bought up large quantities of these weapons to raise the price. It now turns out people aren’t willing to pay such a price for a skin that is not so spectacular. Thus, we see a correction in the market.

John Smith.4610:

ilr.9675:

John Smith.4610:

market manipulation.

… well that’s unfortunate that the head Econ guy doesn’t see “Flipping” as Manipulation.

I’m just curious what else you’d call it when the entire point is to manipulate the final sales price for a bigger profit on something that would have been a lot cheaper if there was no short-term speculating middlemen driving up the prices.

Keep in mind there is a difference between Moving along the Supply Demand curves, and shifting the supply demand curves.

I don’t recall making any statement about what I consider market manipulation? Have a forgotten something?

Again a rather simple and uninformative post on the matter… You asked us to prove market manipulation and yes you failed to define it yourself (just like the OP). However, if you had read the topic, you’d have seen it moved beyond that and we did define manipulation.

It was defined as the ability to set rather than follow the market pricing trends. Thus it is about being able to control prices in (a segment of) the market. Two methods for achieving this were also identified: a) through deception, spreading misinformation b) by owning a very significant share in (a section of) the market. Method a has happened (posting false Mystic Forge recipes on popular websites), but in this thread most concern was raised about method b (gaining a monopoly).

What many of the above posters fail to understand is that it is a matter of scale. Nothing wrong with flipping a few items, but if you are able to flip the prices on all the items in a specific section of the market, then it becomes problematic. If you gain a monopoly in the market, you’re pretty much free to determine the price.

Now – as also stated before – we simply lack the data to prove whether monopolies exist in the market. However, we do know that some market segments are rather small. The Halloween weapons were a perfect example and so are the precursors. Both market sections have very limited supply, making it easier to control them. It boils down to the size of these market sections and the investment needed to gain control.

Related to that, we know that there are a lot of gold sellers active and that these folks make a lot of money. Their bots run unhindered for weeks on end, injecting a huge cash flow into the economy. Players running these bots could easily gather enough funds to also start controlling sections of the market.

So there is reason to worry and what players want to know is;
- Does ANet keep track of the market and the parties playing in it?
- Is ANet monitoring these data actively or not?
- Are there any signs of monopolies as suggested in this thread?
- If this were the case, would ANet intervene or just leave them be?
- Are gold sellers an issue at this point and what is being done against them?

On these issues we haven’t had any significant information for weeks. The official topic on botting was simply closed. The last information we got contained meaningless numbers (10K banned, which probably equals the amount of bots on a single server) and hollow marketing phrases (‘operation bot destruction’). No information on whether accounts associated with botting (e.g., trading accounts, buyer’s accounts) were also banned. No information whether an effort is being made to remove the illegally obtained gold and items from the market. No information on why bots aren’t banned immediately, but are allowed to run until the next ban wave. Etc.

I find this lack of communication rather worrying. I think many players are concerned about the economy and ANet’s capacity to govern it. People see bots running rampant for ages. If you Google these bots on the web, you’ll see they have large communities using them. Their methods become more advanced too; strategies for avoiding detection are being openly discussed and programmed into the bots.

Meanwhile players are getting more and more worried that they can’t compete with the gold sellers and that these parties will gain control over the in-game economy. ANet just goes on to ignore these concerns and thereby alienates from their customers. The quoted post is just another example how the whole discussion in this topic again gets blatantly ignored. Surely, it will be no different after this post.

Let’s not derail the discussion with examples; case studies don’t really help in reaching general conclusions.

Obviously, the price people are willing to pay for an item depends on how badly they want the item (subjective value, largely from comparing with other items available for gold) and the cost of alternatives. ANet erred on the side of crafting by making the list of materials for these exotics insanely expensive. The price ceiling therefore is pretty high.

And if a party is able to buy out all competition, there are no others sources for obtaining the items. This is the definition of a monopoly and that monopolies are a threat to a free market is something I don’t think needs much explanation… Whether you want to call it manipulation or not is a matter of definition. Fact remains that you don’t want monopolies in (sections of) your market.

lackofcheese.5617:

It would be a mistake for a single player to buy a large quantity and post up most of those items at once, due to the risk of being forced to relist. If anything, that’s evidence of it being done by a larger number of players, and not just one.

You’d only have to relist if you get undercut by a substantial amount of items (in proportion to demand). However, supply was finite and had run dry, bar the items people had stock piled on (and from crafting, but that can be left out of the equation probably). Getting undercut in such a finite supply scenario only means you have to wait it out until the items undercutting you get sold. As there is no time limit on sell listings, this is not a problem at all. Or you could simply proceed buying up all items and relisting them at least 15% higher if you have the cash for it. With (nearly) finite supply, this is totally possible.

Also, I do not see why clumping a lot of items at the same price level would be indicative of multiple parties being involved. In almost every other scenario there is undercutting when there are multiple parties involved. In fact, after the huge price spike there was quite a bit of undercutting going on and sell listings rose slightly (e.g., more items were being brought to the market due to the high price level).

@Samuirai: Suppose there was one computer operating system on the market. If you wanted it, you had to pay a huge sum of money. Any competing operating systems were quickly bought of the market by the company owning the one big operating system. This would not be a problem to you? Obviously, one could argue you don’t need a computer nor an operating system…

This game is about cosmetics, about skins, about luxury items if you will. They are the goals people pursue in this game. Saying that they shouldn’t is basically saying people can stop playing the game.

@lackofcheese: The biggest spike happens in one hour (18:00 to 19:00), which also seems to be the frequency at which the bot scans the TP. Unfortunately, I don’t have more precise data. ANet has it perhaps as juno also indicates (but is unwilling to share any insights), but I can’t go beyond the data GW2Spidy provides. Furthermore, I looked at the raw sell listings as an indication of whether they were relisted or bought and kept. The fact that these listings take a hit, but quickly bounce back to their original level seems to indicate to me that items were being relisted.

I agree that the scale of the game is huge and I’m sure this creates certain patterns in the data. I’d still be a bit surprised though to see this sort of an increase simultaneously for all three items. But as I already stated, it’s guesswork and I don’t have access to data to check. You don’t find it extraordinary and I do and I’m afraid we’ll never be able to draw a final conclusion without more data.

Finally, about the false dichotomy; it’s not me who creates this dichotomy, it’s the people categorically denying that gold sellers influence the market in any substantial way (‘market is too big’). I’m trying to broaden the debate from influence versus no influence by advocating looking into specific market sections, such as Halloween weapons and precursors. These sections of the market could easily fall under the control of a handful of players and if that happens it hurts the game…

Anyway, I’ve speculated enough now. Let’s see what ANet says on the matter and how things evolve on the TP in the coming months. Like juno, I seriously hope for some more intelligent communication and less hollow phrases. I’ve meanwhile given up on reporting bots, I just can’t manage to report them all when there’s packs of 30-50 running in teams. I now just submit screenshots and mark them as game-breaking bugs… Still it’s wasting my time and fun.

lackofcheese.5617:

Morrar.1764:

First off, the data is from a crawler that runs every now and then so the half hour isn’t exact. But to buy and relist over a hundred items, I think you’ll need that time given the kitteny UI of the Trading Post.

That’s wrong for several reasons.

First and foremost, if you were buying up a large amount to resell, you would buy them all up first instead of doing it a little bit at a time, because that minimizes the risk of other people buying them up. It’s also quite easy to buy hundreds of items with the current UI, because you can select them or type in a number and buy them up all at once.

The drop in sell listings was quite steep as you can see from the data. It happened pretty much at the exact same time.

Also, if you were intending to resell them, it would typically be a bad idea to put up a large amount all at once, because it would be expensive to relist them if you got undercut.

The relisting is slower indeed, but still rather fast for indepent actors in my opinion.

Morrar.1764:

The connection is obvious, but the pattern is so similar especially in time and magnitude.

If the timing coincides with an official announcement, or a post on a popular website like Reddit (e.g. this one), it could easily have been simultaneous action by a significant number of people.

Only if they saw that post all at the exact same time and responded at the exact same time. I find that highly unlikely, but I guess opinions differ. We simply do not have the data to reach any definite conclusions, so my bet is as good as anyone else’s bet. I’m not claiming to know the truth, but when you consider the alternative (thousands of bots with zero influence on the market) I find it quite unlikely.

In any case, even if this was the actions of one person and not many, it still doesn’t constitute manipulation unless there is an element of deception involved.

In my opinion, manipulating prices doesn’t necessarily involve deception, it could also be done through sheer volume / having a very significant share in the market. It is true that one can raise prices above ‘realistic’ values through deception, but it can also be done through gaining a significant power position. I guess this is mostly a matter of the definition of ‘manipulation’.

Finally, I would again like to state that I’m not in favor of regulation the market per se and definitely not according to the rules of the OP. These rules would rapidly kill trading and are way too restrictive. I would like ANet to take a more firm stance on players who obtain their means through ‘unclean’ methods such as botting. I also think they should monitor these players better.

Banning a few bots won’t help at all (even 10K of them). The bots don’t hold much gold because it’s transferred quickly to trading accounts (gold sellers typically run bot accounts + trading accounts + any number of hacked spam accounts). ANet needs to go after these trading accounts more actively and also needs to remove their excess currency from the market.

As it stands now, they have only showed that: a) they bet on the wrong horse with the DR system b) they have only begun to implement code to detect bots c) they don’t have a clue about whether gold sellers are influencing the market.

Everyone wants it and yes it would be awesome. However the difficulty is due to how the BLT is set up. I am confident they are trying to figure out how to tackle it but I doubt we will hear it implemented “until it’s ready”

Heh yeah… certainly it must be “due to the way the BLTC is setup”… uhuh

Seriously, why would it be complicated “due to the way the BLTC is setup”? The BLTC just lists items. These items have an internal ItemID. This ItemID is linked to a skin / 3D model. The skin can be rendered in 3D in the preview window.

Seriously, as long as you have a specific ItemID, you can render it. Whether you get that ID from your inventory, the trading post or some chat link matters nothing at all…

They just didn’t implement this feature and God knows why…

EDIT: for a work-around, just go to third-party websites. Sites like Guildhead.com have a 3D model preview on many items. Even though these previews do not show (particle) effects on items, you still get a rough idea of what the item may look like. Google image search / Youtube may also help out on the more well-known items.

lackofcheese.5617:

If it was a single party, why would it take them an entire half hour?

The fact that it happened to all three weapons is also not very notable, given that the connection between them is obvious.

First off, the data is from a crawler that runs every now and then so the half hour isn’t exact. But to buy and relist over a hundred items, I think you’ll need that time given the kitteny UI of the Trading Post.

The connection is obvious, but the pattern is so similar especially in time and magnitude.

Ensign.2189:

Morrar.1764:

Given the timing and the magnitude of that operation, I’d say it was one party buying up well over half of all these Halloween weapons and bumping the price up by at least 50G.

I’d say it’s a perfectly rational market reaction to the announcement that the Mad King’s dungeon would be closing down when stage 4 of the Halloween event started. What did you think was going to happen when A.Net announced that the spigot dumping those items into the game was getting turned off?

Seriously, take a closer look at the data, especially the sell listing volumes (raw data). It’s not just about pricing, it’s much more a tale of volumes here.

- The whole operation ran in just under half an hour
- As much as 80% of the weapons were bought
- This happened for all three weapons
- Listings went down 80% then up to the same level, suggesting relisting

It’s the combination of factors here that is important here. The timing and the scale are crucial. I find it very, very unlikely that this pattern would emerge with multiple parties acting independently. This was a coordinated effort simple as that…

People can come up with all sorts of explanations that may hold some merit, but it is the combination of factors that makes me believe someone was manipulating the prices in this case and at a rather large scale.

Now people arguing that manipulation or playing the market is fine are right up to some degree. It is all a matter of scale; monopolies are a threat to the free market, just as they are in a real economy. We also have measures to deal with them, because it is well known that free markets don’t operate well when monopolies exist.

I think this example shows that there are currently parties who can corner a market. Not the whole market, but portions of it. We will see this pattern again if future events follow the same silly formula (high price ceiling due to crafting + temporary high availability). We also see this pattern in the precursor market.

ANet will never admit to this, because we all know which parties are able to obtain a monopoly in the market; it’s botters / gold sellers. ANet is trying to convey that they are tough on bots; read the post where they banned 10.000. However, just Google around for bot programs and you’ll find that the number of downloads goes well over 100.000.

In my opinion, it is completely naive to think that such numbers don’t influence the market, where money can be made more swiftly than anywhere else (once you have some capital to invest)…

John Smith.4610:

I would very much disagree with all of these suggestions. I would also be curious to know what evidence you see of market manipulation.

It’s impossible to prove manipulation as we simply lack the data on who sells or buys what. So that one is a bridge too far. Look at my topic here though: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Mad-Market-Manipulation.

Given the timing and the magnitude of that operation, I’d say it was one party buying up well over half of all these Halloween weapons and bumping the price up by at least 50G.

Obviously, you could say I can’t prove manipulation but I think that is as close I you can get given the data available to us… So yeah, you can always hide behind “you can’t proof it”, but how are we suppose to ever prove it then?

On the other hand everyone knows there’s tons of bots running 24/7 making serious amounts of gold. I don’t think it is unrealistic that these parties are also playing the market and that they are large enough to do so. Some markets aren’t particularly big, like the one for these weapons. I’d say this example involved maybe 2K gold and I’m sure some people can cough that up.

P.S. I’m not saying I agree with the OP’s suggestions btw :-)

Hmm the scale of that graph seems to be missing some numbers

Anyway, a historical overview can also be found here:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Indeed prices have been going up steadily since launch, but peaked heavily during Halloween (BLTC keys I suppose). If you are in to buying and reselling gems, be aware of the 30% spread / tax between the two. Prices need to rise quite significantly (at least more than 30%) to make a profit. This may happen during events, but otherwise I would not count on it

@zerospin: That is what I was suspecting as well… But in my opinion that would be quite upsetting, as the ways gold sellers acquire their means are not always pretty and I wouldn’t want them to have such an influence on the economy

Remember that demand after Halloween will only come from the craftable weapons. You need 2K corn per weapon (the Sigils), but one may wonder whether people find it worthwhile to craft these; the list of other mats is quite expensive and they are only exotic weapons with a decent skin (but nothing like Legendaries).

So there’s firm demand now due to the fact that Candy Corn can still be used for many purposes, but I expect demand to fall too when Halloween has ended.

My 2 cents.

@Warraxx: Did you even bother to look at the graphs? A jump from 39G to 73G is not a spike in your book? Wow. I wonder what is then… Also: 95% of all statistics on the interwebz are made up ;-P

@zerospin: Yeah I expected a rise too, but look at how sudden it is and that it happens at the exact same time for all 3 weapons… That’s kind of the point of this thread. Not that people relist stuff, but that it happened in significant quantities, across different weapons and at a single point in time…

True, others will benefit too and you can see this happening. After the price increase, sell listings have increased and undercutting also start pressing the prices down again. So from there on the market assumes its normal function.

However, it could be worrying IF indeed this was the action of a single party. Why? Just because of the size of it; if a single party could have such an effect on the market, I wouldn’t consider that healthy. I have similar concerns about the precursor market. Moreover, given that bots run rampart in this game (saw more than 50 in a single zone yesterday), I’m also concerned what their influence is. If this ‘worst case scenario’ is true, I think ANet should take action…

Now I know all this is wild speculation as I don’t have the exact data to back it up. However, I did find the pattern of these data quite extraordinary and interesting…. I probably should have at least added a question mark to the title :-D

Lavec.8157:

Morrar.1764:

If you look at sell listing volume, there isn’t a noticeable change there at all (only a very small dip in the raw data).

I can see quite a dip in raw sell volumes. From 20 to 10, 45 to 17, and 61 to 21.

Yeah in the raw data there’s a dip of maybe 50% in sell listings, but it last like half an hour tops… So that could be the time needed to complete the operation? It coincides perfectly with the price sky-rocketing…

Obviously, it could be the case that many people suddenly started buying up the lower priced weapons, but the timing and the fact that it’s similar for all 3 weapons made me a bit suspicious.

Then again, I only have the limited data from these graphs and I’m no expert in economy so obviously I could be wrong…

@lackofcheese: well i kind of have a lackofdata here, so I can’t really ‘prove’ anything. But I guess ArenaNet could look into these matters, hence the post.

If you look at sell listing volume, there isn’t a noticeable change there at all (only a very small dip in the raw data). So I’m assuming items are being re-listed at a higher price. This pattern would be quite coincidental if it was new ones being put up and old ones being sold in my opinion.

Also note that the availability after the new pricing increases, so more people are coming to the market due to the higher prices, indicating there was more supply in the game. Also the prices take on a more normal pattern of declining due to undercutting from that point on.

Anyone else noted the huge market manipulation involving the Halloween weapons? Look at these graphs (put them at 1 day and look at the sell listings):

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/36070
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/36056
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/36051

As you can see, between 17:45 ~ 18:30 on Wednesday 31 Oct the prices were pushed up by around 40G for each of these weapons… Given the timing, I’d say that this is the work of one big fish here.

Given the number of weapons available (25 for the staff, 40 for the bow and 60 for the shield) that operation must have cost quite a bit (I’d estimate between 1.5K and 2K gold). However, given the costs required to craft these weapons, I’m sure there’s a profit to be made here.

Obviously, selling the weapons for very low prices was silly and I was also hoping to make some profit on them. However, the scale of this operation is kind of worrying in my opinion. If there are parties that can play the market this way, that seems kind of unhealthy (assuming it was done by a single party, either person or guild or botter).

My opinion on Halloween:

Artwork / scenery
Loved the artwork and the way ANet transformed Lion’s Arch. Reaper’s Rumble looked great too. The Labyrinth was somewhat boring in my opinion. Would have loved to see the other cities transformed too, but I guess that would have taken too much time (especially so shortly after release).

Mad King encounter:
The encounter was rather easy, but great fun. I think the Mad King Says could be ignored a bit too easily. Other than that, I liked the King’s skills (scarecrow’s and exploding pumpkins) and the jumping elements in the dungeon. Nice voice-acting too!

PVP-games:
I liked Reaper’s Rumble, but maybe the matches were a bit on the short side. Couldn’t really figure out Lunatic Inquisition myself, but I heard others had a blast doing it. I think both games were pretty good and were received very well.

Clock tower:
I really liked the challenge. Yes there were frustrating moments. Yes there were big Charr and Norn blocking my view (I also ran it with a Charr and Norn myself btw). But overall, I really enjoyed the challenge. Shame it only resulted in Slippers though and there was no incentive to run it again.

Ghost hunts:
I think these could have been kind of fun. However, I kind of spoiled it for myself by checking out a guide (didn’t have much time to play). At least it provided a bit of background story-telling to the event, which is nice.

Achievements:
Both the achievements to eat candy corn and carve pumpkins were rather boring. I guess a game needs such grindy achievements, but I got little fun out of them

Rewards / items:
I guess this was my biggest gripe with the event; the rewards were way too random. I didn’t buy keys, but gambling with the BLTC chest was totally unfun. Mad King’s Chests solved some of it, but it left a bad taste.

Same goes for the Halloween Weapons; I stockpiled the rare crafting materials, only to find out a little later that it was pointless… It was much cheaper to get the recipe from the TP. Heck, even the weapons were cheap on the TP. This was quite a disappointment.

I think ANet really dropped the ball in this department and I hope they improve the rewards for the next event… Far, far less RNG and please reward people’s hard work more.

Overall:
The event was good and I enjoyed it. Biggest issue for me was the randomness of the reward system. Other than that, I hope ANet keeps up the good work with these holiday events!

This is a link to the trait build you mentioned:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcRM9fGx9MGVsmabVa

The description of Trait V “Berserker’s Power” in the Strength tree reads:

Increased damage based how much adrenaline you have built.
Stage 1: 3%.
Stage 2: 7%.
Stage 3: 12%.

Hits build up adrenaline, but as far as I know it is not 1 hit equals 1 adrenaline stage. It also has only 3 stages and maxes out at 12%.

So what exactly is the bug here? Is the description not accurate? Does it go beyond 12% total (according to you it is even 12-20% per target hit)? The numbers in the log are also a bit confusing; quite some low numbers around 2K-3K and then suddenly a huge jump towards the end. You also happen to have 6 stacks of Might on you there.

I’m kind of left wondering whether it is a case of bad scaling or actually a bugged trait here… The scenario were you can hit a lot of enemies with a single blade trail is also kind of uncommon, apart from perhaps in WvW or when a necro has a lot of summons out (as in the example).

P.S. Note that I’m not trying to defend the insane damage numbers; I’m just wondering whether damage scaling is off (for this skill or combination of traits) or whether the trait Berserker’s Power is bugged.

Well seems quite a few things factor in here, both on the demand and the supply side.

In terms of demand, the bow and Greatsaw may be the most sought after, followed by the staff and finally the shield. Looking at gw2spidy.com, the number of sell listings for the items do not seem to differ all that much (around 40 available, but indeed there’s a sharp drop for Greatsaw recently). The higher price for the Greatsaw in my opinion indicates that it’s more sought after / more in demand. Looking at the popularity of the greatsword legendaries, I think betting on the Greatsaw makes sense…

With regard to crafting; it is true that one can craft the other weapons after Halloween ends, but I don’t consider this a viable option for 2 reasons:

1) The materials needed drop only during Halloween. In particular, the craft needs 2000 candy corn even if one already has all the required recipes. To craft these weapons in bulk, you’d need to stock up on candy corn big time.

2)The material costs are insane for an exotic (around 150G+) and I doubt people will spend such an amount of resources on a single exotic item. Those who do, will probably keep the item for themselves rather than trade it.

In any case, I don’t expect a bulk of these weapons to appear after Halloween nor do I think people would be willing to pay the material cost. The craftable versions were just a big mistake on ANet’s part (which they tried to fix by making them random drops).

That said, your question pretty much boils down to: do I want to gamble on 1 highly sought after skin (Greatsaw) or 2 somewhat less sought after skins (Crossing + Arachnophobia). Hard to give a good answer, but I’d at least wait until Act 4 is nearly over to see how prices develop for the weapons…

@AngryYoda: it’s 25 × .6%. Note the dot there! And 25 × 0.6% equals 15% so his list is correct. If it were 6% that would be totally unbalanced.

Ontopic: I notice an effect of MF when farming regular mobs in Cursed Shore. I don’t wear my set in dungeons. MF does not seem to affect drops from chests, bags, etc.

Edit: Oh seems he removed his post….

Let’s not discuss whether chasing a Legendary is silly or not. People set goals for themselves in a game and they get satisfaction from pursuing these goals. Whether you think a goal is silly is a matter of personal preference.

What we can discuss, however, is whether the road to these goals makes sense. In particular, we can discuss the amount of luck involved. How people evaluate rewards largely depends on how these rewards relate to the efforts they put in. On one end of the scale there is no correlation between effort and rewards and rewards completely depend on luck. On the other end of the scale, rewards totally depend on effort and no luck is involved. How do people evaluate these different reward systems?

When everything depends completely on luck, people may feel that much of their effort goes unrewarded. When they do get a reward, it doesn’t satisfy them because it is completely unrelated to the effort they put in (although some are quick to come up with rationalizations why they ‘deserved’ the reward). Moreover, this system leads to feelings of unfairness as some people get rewards without putting any effort in, while others get nothing and put in a lot of effort. In conclusion, random rewards are not satisfying at all.

At the opposite end of the scale -where rewards totally depend on effort- people also tend to be unsatisfied. In this scenario, rewards often feel like a grind, like working if you will. People then tend to go about and make a plan, grind and cross things of their list. This system often feels like it lacks excitement.

In the end, rewards therefore need to be a combination of effort and luck ( alot of research supports this finding by the way). It’s this combination that is crucial. When we look at Legendaries, part of it is a pure grind (i.e., karma, tokens), part of it is a grind with some luck involved (i.e., lodestones) and part of it is pure luck (precursors). Unfortunately, the precursor part has turned out to be the most important obstacle in obtaining a Legendary, dwarfing all other components. In my opinion (and I think many agree here) this is simply bad game design.

This could easily be cured by reducing the luck factor involved in obtaining precursors and increasing the effort factor. For example, instead of getting the precursor (or not) with a 0.01% chance one could implement a system with shards. In such a scenario one would have a 0.1% chance on a shard and 10 shards combine into a precursor.

Note that the overall chance to get a precursor stays the same (so they do not necessarily become more common), but the system allows one to ‘work towards’ getting a precursor. It will feel more rewarding and also reduces the unfairness between players.

In my opinion, this is just another case of ANet not really thinking about their reward system. They made the skins for these weapons, then some guy came up with a list of materials, then they found out that the community didn’t like the weapons that much.

They couldn’t change the recipes and they couldn’t make the materials drop more frequently (as many are also tied to Legendaries). So they just made the weapons random drops to please the crowd. In the process they gave the finger to crafters, but I guess that was the most acceptable solution.

The list of errors in the reward department is much longer though:

- Low droprate of Halloween skins from BLTC chest
=> Solution: Mad King’s Chests (another RNG solution)

- Labyrinth champion chest
=> Solution: Can only loot once per day

- Dungeon tokens too easy to farm from chests
=> Solution: Give tokens at the end of the dungeon + diminishing returns

- Heaps of Karma needed for Legendaries
=> Solution: Jugs of Liquid Karma (need to be online daily)
=> Related: Diminishing returns on Event rewards

There are so many examples out there were ANet adjusted the reward schemes, the list is probably much longer. Given the importance of rewards in games like these, I cannot understand ANet’s amateurism in this regard. Some of their solutions are also lacking, the Halloween skins as random drop being a very good example…

I hope they will put more thought into their reward systems in the future. It is disheartening to farm materials only to have them become worthless the next day because of a random drop. Across the board, I also hope they reduce their reliance on the RNG. An RNG is such a lazy and unimaginative solution to keep items rare and it really puts players off as Cerise already pointed out very nicely.

OK, I was talking about items on the market, but obviously we can talk materials too.

I understand where you’re coming from and why a trader would place a buy order 15% under the current lowest sell order. However, sellers will only fill such orders if a) they want to make quick cash b) they expect the price to drop c) there are no other ways to make profit from the item.

Concerning a) people may be willing to give up some profit to get cash at that very moment. However, if vendors are offering that same option it puts a lower limit on buy orders. Both items and materials have vendor prices.

Concerning b) prices are quite stable for materials — it’s not very profitable therefore for traders to bet on materials for making profit. If you look at the price of Copper, for example, you’ll notice that the price is pretty steady, only going down slowly: http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19697. Indeed the graph also shows the 15% margin as expected, being the 0 profit margin for traders.

Concerning c) the biggest difference between items and materials is the different demand. As I outlined above, the supply of many items will infinitely outgrow the demand. So for items, the vendor price + 15% is pretty much the minimum, selling below that is just outright silly. Materials still have some use for crafting and that’s why the price is still slightly higher than vendor price (also an indication it’s not only traders in the market).

Anyway, I think we mostly agree on why certain margins exist and for which type of items. However, this discussion may not be very relevant for the suggestion of the OP to allow people to withdraw or alter their sell orders. The point of my first post was to show that for items the problem lies more in balancing supply and demand than in the 5% fee or 10% cut.

Well 15% is pretty steep, so no preventing it was worded a bit strong but it became a lot harder indeed. I’m not sure why you think the 15% will be the margin between buy and sell orders. If I remember correctly, one still pays a fee and cut even when fulfilling a buy order, but now I’m not 100% sure…

It should at least be the margin between sell orders and vendor prices, even though that is currently not the case. This could be due to the fact that the 10% cut is listed nowhere in the UI, which is a big mistake on ArenaNet’s part in my opinion. The 5% listing fee is shown, however, but I have no idea why people ignore it. Could be ill understanding of the concept or related to inventory management and the ease of selling stuff on the spot. Or perhaps a preference for selling an item to someone who uses it rather than to a vendor… Who knows…

Not sure how to read that last line. Crafting is something you should primarily do for your own items and the convenience of being able to make the gear you want (with the stats you like best). Crafting was never meant to be profitable, except perhaps at the highest levels. Then again, leveling crafting literally takes no effort and thus the rewards should reflect that. You already gain a bulk of XP leveling a crafting discipline, why should it also be economically profitable on top of that?

To be honest, the listing fee is fine and prevents speculation as is already mentioned above by many posters. Having to make up for a 15% price difference (listing fee + cut) makes it harder to buy items in bulk and listing them again at a slightly higher price. At least in the case that there are no sudden price gaps and substantial amounts of items are on the market.

Furthermore, there will always be undercutters and this will drive prices to the ‘reservation price’ mentioned earlier. This price is largely determined by supply and demand and this is really where the economy fails in this game in my opinion.

It’s easy to see that there is no market for blue items; their supply is unlimited as they drop plenty and are crafted often. Most importantly, they are never taken out of the world unless sold or salvaged. Demand for blue items will therefore always remain low.

Masterwork, Rare and Exotic items are in a slightly better position due to being Bind on Equip. However, for Masterwork items the demand will probably also be rather low as they are not a huge upgrade from an equivalent blue item.

In the end, I guess there will only be a market for Rare and Exotic items and the associated crafting materials. Oh and possibly consumables if they are going to be more or less required to beat certain content.

@Above: There’s already a system of bidding using buy orders. However, there’s no time limit as is custom with regular Auction Houses.

Manny.9081:

Confirming OP. Aurora Glade player here as well; the Gates of Arah event chain hasn’t continued either direction and is stuck at “The Pact is preparing to establish a forward base”

Same thing on Piken Square (EU)

Sadly I have to agree with you. It seems so many DE bug and don’t reset that it affects game play. It also became the most prominent topic in /map in my experience. In my opinion this is not what social interaction should be about.

Was leveling my Mesmer in Brisban Wildlands on Piken Square (EU) yesterday and of the 10 events I encountered, 8 were bugged out. I reported all, but this took quite some of my game time. Moreover, it affected game play as I had to move to another zone and craft to get sufficient XP.

Got my main parked in Cursed Shore, but there also the main event line is bugged. As a result, we haven’t been able to enter Arah for the last 2 days at least.

I think ANet really needs to step up here; it’s bad publicity and affects game play across the board. Server restarts aren’t ideal, but it is a quick solution at least. Adding reset condition to events would be better, i.e., let an event reset if after X minutes the NPC has not reached it’s destination. It seems that NPCs getting stuck on terrain is the most common cause for events to get stuck.